Mary is seven. Homer
Is her favorite author.. . . She says, “Aren’t those gods
Terrible? All they do is
Fight like those angels in Milton
& play tricks on the poor Greeks
& Trojans. I like Aias
& Odysseus best. They are
Lots better than those silly
Gods.”

END OF THE MAYAN LONG CYCLE: 13 bactuns, which is 13*144000 days or 5125.26 years (roughly).

Ahhhhh, the good ol' days! We thought they'd never end....

1375 -- Giovanni Boccaccio dies at 62 in Certaldo, Italy.

1549 -- Margaret of Angoulême dies in Odos-Bigorre. Queen consort of Henry II of Navarre, a patron of humanities & religious reformers & an author. Her most important work, Heptaméron, is constructed on the lines of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, (who died on the same day), consisting of 72 tales (out of a planned 100) told by a group of travelers delayed by a flood on their return from a Pyrenean spa. The stories, illustrating the triumphs of virtue, honor, & quick-wittedness, & the frustration of vice & hypocrisy, contain a strong element of satire directed against licentious & grasping monks & clerics.

1620 -- Forefathers' day celebrates landing at Plymouth Rock.

Pilgrims first land at Plymouth Rock. It's not a very big rock, but then they weren't very big Pilgrims. The Mayflower, with a contingent of Puritan separatists from the Church of England, landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. It had set out 15 September from Plymouth, England; its original destination was Virginia.

1790 -- US: Samuel Slater's thread-spinning factory goes into production, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in America. The workers at his machines are 4 to 10 years old.

The victory convinces Captain Jack's Modocs that their magic is strong enough to protect them against the white man's bullets. The two sides fought at a distance of about 50 yards in one spot. No Modocs were killed, 24 soldiers were killed & at least another dozen were wounded.

Source: Thanks to daver@flag.blackened.net who typed & provided this text to the Daily Bleed

"Take me this way: a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life — a rude & blundering bird, used to large airs & great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence."

— Jack London to Anna Strunsky, December 21, 1899; first published in The Masses, July 1917

"The continual need to defend the individual & the family fired both Boll's creative energy & his trenchant criticism of politicians & journalists who seemed to care for neither. His solidarity with the young & the disadvantaged, his refusal to indulge in cold-war politics & his more recent presence at mass demonstrations in the Federal Republic against nuclear weapons brought him much public ridicule & detestation. The award of the Nobel Prize in 1972 was greeted in some quarters with undisguised dismay, & as recently as 1983 Boll was invited by the Kulturminister of Baden-Wurttemberg to consider emigration."

1924 -- Germany: After five years of prison for his participation in the Republic of the Workers Councils, anarchist Erich Mühsam is amnestied. Thousands of workers turn out for his release. German anarchist poet, murdered by the Nazis at the Orianenburg concentration camp.

Units under the command of the Generals 'El Campesino', Lister & Modesto enter the city today. Machinegunners cover windows & doors, while dynamiters advance to blow up strong points. The soldiers are seizing lower floors of buildings, whose upper stories are defended to death. As in the University City Madrid 1936, grenades & oaths are hurled down stairwells, water pipes & wiring is being destroyed, soldiers are wrestling & bayoneting one another in the darkness.

1948 -- "The girls lined up for the annual relay of the Young Communist League Cup."

"Miss Krapivnitskaya, the fastest of them all, was at
the tape. Just as the starter was about to fire his gun, a man on a motorcycle snatched up Miss Krapivnitskaya & sped away. He turned out to be the coach of a rival team. But Miss Krapivnitskaya refused to surrender.

She broke away, dashed toward the river, jumped into a boat, & began rowing. She reached the opposite bank & began a race against time to reach the track before the race began.

Miss Krapivnitskaya lost the race, but she & her team were promised justice."

"RELAY MISCHIEF": MOSCOW, International Herald Tribune

1952 -- World ends, according to the entity Sananda. (Well, some still claim it did...)

1953 -- US: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Atomic Development Project during WWII, told that Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Eisenhower wanted "a blank wall" placed between him & secret data, pending a security review on charges that he was a Communist symp.

1970 -- US: Elvis Presley asks Pres. Nixon to name him a special anti-drug agent! In what becomes quite the photo-op, Elvis Presley goes to the White House to volunteer his services to Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Dick M Nixon on fighting the nation's drug problems. He gives Nixon a chrome-plated Colt .45 while Tricky Dick gives him, fittingly, a Narcotics Bureau badge.

By the time Elvis was buried, his eyes bulged out, ripping the stitches that once held them shut. Elvis' grossly swollen tongue stuck out from between his lips, his mouth still mostly screwed shut. After a week, the pungent discharges from his body stained the coffin's once opulent lining, which began sagging & tearing under the strain of so much rotting meat.

His idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, & philosophy by focusing on subjects as diverse as gems & the sacred. Instrumental in introducing Latin American authors to the French public (Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, et al). Spent WWII exiled in Argentina, & active in fighting the spread of Nazism in Latin America as an editor & author of anti-Nazi periodicals. With Georges Bataille & others attempted to shift the focus of Surrealism from the dream life of little old rich ladies to the social arena.

1980 -- Marc Connelly dies in New York. American playwright, journalist, teacher, actor, director, member of the Algonquin Round Table group of writers.

1986 -- US Senator Laxalt announces Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Acting President Ronnie Reagan"is going to be in high visibility" in coming days "to demonstrate to the country that he's fully in charge."

Says a White House aide of Laxalt's statement, "When we heard it, we all cracked up."

"The White House has always attracted the mentally ill."

— Secret Service agent Vincent Charles

1987 -- US: Three white teenagers convicted in New York City of manslaughter in 1986 death of a young black man, Michael Griffith. After entering a restaurant in Howard Beach, he was chased by about a dozen whites, ran onto a highway to escape & was killed.

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, & water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

2001 -- US: Larry Mayes, 52, is released from an Indiana prison after serving 21 years for a rape he didn't commit; he becomes the 100th innocent American convict freed by DNA evidence. Justice is indeed blind.

2007 -- Lakota activists declare secession from the US. A delegation claiming to represent the Lakota Indian Tribe, have signed a document stating that the tribe withdraws & / or cancels all treaties with the US & formally establishes independence from the country. "We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," said activist Phyllis Young, who helped to organize a 1977 conference in Geneva on "indigenous rights." http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Lakota_activists_declare_secession_from_US

2013 -- Oh woe, oh woe! So much xmas shopping done gone to waste!

3000 --

NEGRO:

Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed — not by its residents — Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

— from The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan

3500 --

"Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle ... mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle."